The Plextor PX-716A DVD±R/RW CD-R/RW internal E-IDE (ATAPI) drive from Plextor® offer all the advantages or our legendary CD-RW drives. Along with double layer and dual format capabilities, the PX-716A is also supported by Intelligent Recording technology to enhance your recording activities. The drive achives blazing fast 16X CAV performance on recommended 8X DVD+R media, and burns a 4.7GB DVD in less than six minutes, the drive also supports dual-layer DVD media, enabling users to burn up to four hours of high-quality.
1 Excellent Performance
This DVD-RW will run rings around the other DVD-RW drives and it can burn 8x media at higher speeds. It also got 10 out of 10 stars and a maximum kick a** award from Maximum PC Magazine. Excellent product!!
2 Plextor PX-716A Review
Nice Burner,Works like a charm can deal with all media
i burn 4.2GB to my HP DVD in 8 min so fast and quite
the software that came with it so nice also
you can do many profesional things
rely plextor king of quality
3 I expected better from Plextor
I've owned many optical drives over the years, several of them Plextor. I'd always been happy w/the Plextors, but I never had one fail on me, so I'd never had to deal w/the company. I bought the 716A online (not at Amazon) back in January. That online merchant's policy was that any warranty problems had to be dealt with directly w/Plextor. I didn't think much about that at the time, since I'd always had such good luck w/my Plextors.
Within a week, the 716A I'd purchased began to fail. Within 2 weeks, it would no longer read or write a disk. Even tho this problem w/this particular drive has been pointed out on several forums, Plextor tech support has a very rigid diagnostic routine they insist you perform. Once I'd proved to them that yes, the drive was indeed bad, they gave me a "ticket number" that I had to use to then contact their RMA dept.
I submitted the online form I was told to fill out, and received an RMA # w/a lot of boilerplate rules for returning products. One of the rules was that the customer paid shipping costs to Plextor (Plextor pays them back to the customer). Surely, I thought, since the drive went bad after only a week, and since the company makes such fine products, they would be happy to pick up the drive, since it was so obviously defective.
I was wrong. Not only would they not pay the shipping to them, they would not reply directly to my emails--they just kept sending me the boilerplate rules over and over, no matter how I begged or pleaded in my emails for them to respond. I assume they wanted me to read the part that said the customer pays shipping to, "No Exceptions" (their words).
So, defeated, and holding a useless $130 drive, I reluctantly ponied up the $11 shipping via UPS (the least expensive secure method that can be tracked; Plextor recommends against using U.S. Mail).
From the time of my first email (which had actually gone unanswered) to when I had the replacement drive in my hands, was nearly 2 months.
But wait, it gets better. The replacement drive, which was supposed to be new, has now failed. And more quickly than the first one did, in under a week of regular use. It has failed in the exact same way as the first one.
As Plextor tech "support", and the RMA dept especially, are not very helpful or sympathetic, I have written an email to their Public Relations dept., describing my situation. I have yet to hear back.
You will read many glowing reviews of this drive. And I want to say that, yes, when it worked, it was the fastest DVD drive I've yet used. But from my (admittedly unscientific) survey of user comments on other forums, it appears about 10-20% of these drives may be bad. Or it may just be the twenty or so reviews I read about the problem. Or it could be just one group of drives--both my bad drives had a manufacture date on the sticker of Dec 2004. (Also an oddity: the one I bought in January had a reasonable manufacture date of 12/04, but the one they sent me in March, presumably, should have had a newer date.)
At this moment I am out the $130 for the drive, plus the shipping costs, and I have no doubt that, given their initial attitude, Plextor would want me to pay shipping again to send the second bad drive back. I seriously doubt I'll ever deal w/this company again.
My final recommendation: if you must have this drive, be sure to purchase it from a dealer to whom you can return it in 30 days. Unless you install the drive immediately and torture test it for several days, it could take as long as a month to go bad (if it's going to do that). And then you're stuck paying to have Plextor take it back.
